Minutia

a haiku

Above – I awake –
On housetop, a lone sparrow –
Cold – snow is falling.

Doxology

Violin bends,
Bows notes –
I bend and bow,
In this court
Of praise.

Drum beat –
Righting heart –
To the rhythm
Of this place.

All accord –
Flats and sharps,
Major and minor.
Piano reminder,
We are song.

We sing,
In life –
Bitterness
Of plight –
Unison words
Recite the dark
In the well
Of our heart.
A candle slowly
Let down
To the bottom –
Where water,
As music,
Replenishes.

And All This, In January, In Chicago

Yesterday, I flew a kite with my children –
          wore no coats;
          my eldest was in shorts,
          my youngest in a short sleeved shirt.
The kite would lift then crash,
          as the wind would come and go –

Blowing in today –
          A morning rain,
                      then this:
          An afternoon snow.

Ode To Patty Sullivan

Who is Patty Sullivan –
       and how did I come to have her dictionary?

My father recalls no one by this name.
My mother dead these now fifteen years.
The book coming to me off their shelf –

(Some friend of a friend who let them
       borrow the book into keeping?)

It has since traveled through at least three states,
       to my home on my desk,
       twenty-five years after it was published and bought.

Could it have been a gift?
What gave Patty S. the impulse to scroll her name
       on the cover’s page?
Does she want her dictionary back?

O, Patty Sullivan,
       I have your dictionary,
       it is a fine book,
       I treat it with care and come to it often.

One's Born Days

a villanelle

As the seasons, so in turn, our living is a dying –
Seedling bound to the earth while reaching to the sky;
As paragraph to novel grows, so is our abiding.

To spread and branch into this world hopeful in residing –
Rings of wood and numbered page watch as they imply,
As the seasons, so in turn, our living is a dying.

What is mankind moved to do within this coinciding –
When declensions of our day define that we are born to die.
As paragraph to novel grows, so is our abiding.

Or woodsman with his axe display how worldviews are colliding.
The happiness unquestioned, but the sorrow leads to why –
As the seasons, so in turn, our living is a dying.

We wax and wane through night and day bound by our deciding –
Find a shelter in the toil (cocooned in truth with sights to fly),
As paragraph to novel grows, so is our abiding.

If sacrifice and choice of love while self begins subsiding –
Then joy exists on the earth and this should mystify;
As the seasons, so in turn, our living is a dying –
As paragraph to novel turns, so is our abiding –